Brendan Coots
Forum Replies Created
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I agree with Mark’s comments, except that I wouldn’t worry about legal costs. This is strictly small claims court material so there shouldn’t be ANY costs outside of your time and energy serving the defendant their notice.
Brendan Coots
Creative Director
Brandflow Video Studio -
Your only (legal) obligations with any client are those spelled out in your contract. If you don’t have a contract with this client, then you have no (legal) obligation to them. As a business, you DO have an obligation to provide good service, but that doesn’t include indefinite storage of old files that will never be used again.
Your best bet is probably to just forget the calls and certified letters, drop the files on a $80 external drive and mail it off to them with a kind note.
Brendan Coots
Creative Director
Animatik Creative -
Hi David,
Man, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted here! Anyway, You’re spot on but this whole topic highlights what I’ve come to see as the single biggest problem in our industry.
Most ‘normal’ businesses offer a service, and the customer pays for the service. It is just assumed that you get only what you pay for, and the provider is not being unreasonable to expect payment for changes i.e. a new or different product. Somewhere along the line, video producers got all touchy-feely with clients and sent a message that we’re different – totally willing to bend over backwards, take huge losses and STILL get treated like garbage for our efforts.
The solution isn’t to stop trying to please our clients, we all just need to set hard, unwavering boundaries of what is and isn’t acceptable, and codify those boundaries in our contracts. When a client oversteps the boundary, especially in a manner that shows utter disrespect and contempt like the OP’s story, they are no longer a client worth keeping and should be fired. I know that’s not easy (especially in this economy), but the alternative is to spend your life serving clients that will walk all over you at every opportunity. Life’s too short for that.
Brendan Coots
Creative Director
Animatik Creative -
Rendering to fields WILL affect the resulting motion of your animation/graphics. You can test this by animating a colored box moving from left to right across your screen. Do one moving fast and another going much slower. Render out to a progressive file and one interlaced, then play both back on an ntsc monitor. You should notice the progressive-rendered file is more choppy, especially at slower animated speeds. In short, I render to fields any time there is horizontal motion or slower animations of any type.
I am no Avid expert so this may be subject to debate, but you may also be saving your editor time on the import if the file is already rendered to fields (saving Avid the additional calculating time). Don’t know about your shop, but most places the Avid suite is vastly more expensive than a graphics station, so there is a cost motive for doing as much as possible on your end.